


La Vie en Rouge

by teamchaosprez



Category: Persona 5, Persona Series
Genre: Akechi Goro Lives, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Falling In Love, Hospitals, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Post-Canon, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2020-12-25 00:26:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21108476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teamchaosprez/pseuds/teamchaosprez
Summary: It is not your time yet, Akechi Goro.Return to the world of the living.And do not waste your second chance.Updates Sundays. On break until December.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i plan on making future chapters longer - this one just exists to set up akechi's survival.
> 
> he already has a crush on akira but he doesnt wanna admit it

Two gunshots rang out, and when Goro opened his eyes, he saw his cognitive double disappearing from view. He had succeeded in, at least, killing that. As he looked around, though, he cringed at the thought of having to fight all of these Shadows in his current state - it wasn’t possible. He was going to die, he realized as he put a hand over the bloody gunshot wound on his chest. He was going to die, sacrifice himself for the safety of the Phantom Thieves, and - while that had been his intent when he shot the switch - he couldn’t help but find it almost  _ disgustingly _ ironic.

A martyr for a cause he didn’t even fully believe in. A fitting way for him to go.

Still, the words of the Phantom Thieves echoed in his head.  _ It doesn’t have to be this way, _ Akira told him.  _ You can change things. You can help us change his heart. You can repent. You can recover. _ How funny, the idea that he could ever  _ get better. _ His past had him in its jaws - had mauled him in ways he would never recover from. It weighed down on him, cracking his ribs and puncturing his lungs until he drowned in his own blood. Every moment of his life was a fight to stay alive against forced within him that so badly wanted him gone. Every second was a battle to keep going.

All that time pushing through his mental illnesses, all that time trying to prove his worth, all the blood on his hands as he tore through targets trying to gain Shido’s trust… all of it was for nothing. He laughed aloud from the irony of it all, and couldn’t seem to stop even as the spasming of his body caused the wound in his chest to ache even more. He was dying - he couldn’t remain on his feet for much longer. He wondered why he couldn’t just lay down and die.

A realization as he asked himself that hit him harder than the bullet had.

_ I don’t want to die. _

Fear coursed through him, fast and furious and barreling all the suicidal feelings of every other second of his life far from his mind. He didn’t want to go - the offer of a second chance offered to him by the Phantom Thieves was all he could think about. He had another chance; a chance to make things right. A concept that seemed so funny to him just moments before was now tethering him to his body.

He dug his hand into his pocket, and his hand closed around a Goho-M that he put there that morning.  _ I don’t want to die. _

He raised it over his head just as the Shadows began approaching him to finish him off, threw it with all the strength left in his body onto the ground.  _ I don’t want to die. _

He barely processed that he was now in front of the Palace’s entrance, dizzy and rapidly losing blood. His body was growing numb and cold.  _ I don’t want to die. _

His hand scrambled for his phone, swiped desperately at the Metaverse Navigator. Blood was smeared on the screen, until he finally managed to press the button.  _ I don’t want to die. _

The familiar streets of Tokyo materialized around him. He collapsed, no longer possessing the strength to hold himself up. His vision was starting to black out around the corners. He opened his mouth to try and call out for help, but no matter how hard he tried, his voice wouldn’t come.

_ I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to d _

* * *

He was awoken by the feeling of being lifted off the ground. As the wound on his chest, now internal, was jostled, pain jolted through his entire body. If he was capable of it, he would have cried out, but he couldn’t - he couldn’t even really react, only able to lay as still as a doll as the person holding him started running. Goro could hear voices around him - they sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on who they belonged to. He could only catch brief pieces of sentences.

_ … Akechi’s still alive… _

_ … losing him… _

_ … for real?... _

_ … nearest hospital… _

_ … have an actual map… _

_ … be okay… _

_ … stay with us… _

_ … Goro please… _

_ … stay… us… be… ok...y… _

* * *

He gained a very small amount of consciousness again when he was changing hands, being passed from the arms of whoever was holding him over to a firm surface. Red eyes, dazed, opened briefly, and the world was entirely too bright and blurry for him to make any sense of it at all.

He did, however, recognize the boy that was now watching him go further away. Akira. He wore a dark hoodie and jeans, and Goro wondered where the Joker getup had gone, not fully remembering the difference between the Metaverse and the real world. A stroke of panic struck him. He wanted to call out to the phantom thief, beg him to come with, plead with him to not leave him behind. Goro felt like a piece of his heart was getting ripped away from him by the people wheeling him away.

He choked on something in his throat, and spluttered out something thick and inky. Panicked chatter sounded around him, but he couldn’t make sense of any of it.

Goro tried to stay awake this time. He wanted to find the strength he needed to demand Akira come back to him, and the knowledge that he was dying had started rushing back to him - if he passed out again, he would die, right? If he closed his eyes, this time they might never open.

The battle was for nothing, though. He was so tired, so weak…

His vision went dark again.

* * *

_ Poor Akechi Goro. _

_ You didn’t choose this life, did you? You didn’t want to be born to an absent father and a depressed mother. You didn’t want to be such a curse… you just wanted to be loved and accepted like everyone else, didn’t you? And the gods took advantage of you. They wanted to turn you into their Trickster, a pawn in a war that they created between themselves. You were so young when you awoke to your Persona… too young to understand the power being handed to you. _

_ A child then, a child now. You have evolved from wanting to stand up to your father’s evil to becoming that evil yourself. Or… no, evil isn’t a correct term for you. You have done evil things, yes, but it was never your intent to follow this path, was it? _

_ You never deserved any of what you were given. We were irresponsible to help you turn into this, and we were irresponsible to never realize what you were becoming. _

_ We’re sorry. _

_ We must take your ability to summon your Persona from you, although the power would not remain with you for much longer anyway. You will need to find your way on your own now. _

_ It is not your time yet, Akechi Goro. _

_ Return to the world of the living. _

_ And do not waste your second chance. _


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Goro wakes up in the hospital, and gets three visitors he didn't necessarily expect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> akira isn't in this chapter but he will be in the next i promise
> 
> i've rped for sae before but have never written makoto so please forgive me if she's a little bit ooc!

For what he would later find out was almost a week, Goro drifted in and out of consciousness. His blinks of the world were quick, shrouded in pain and a piercing ache in his skull; a high pitched beeping behind him would speed up, and he would realize that it was monitoring his heart rate. A commotion of voices, words and sentences he couldn’t make heads or tails of, would rush around him; he couldn’t make out features, but through foggy vision he could see silhouettes, and with a severely muted sense of touch he could feel hands against his wrists and head. A piercing pain would reach his upper arm after a few minutes, and he would drift back under the surface of consciousness to sleep for a while more. But for a few brief minutes before blacking out, unable to move, he would be able to think.

Were they trying to keep him under? Were they trying to keep him compliant? He wasn’t sure - perhaps it was for the good of his own health. He could vaguely, painfully recall spitting out inky liquid; did that mean he was suffering from a mental shutdown? But he was still capable of rational thought, and a shutdown implied he wouldn’t be able to function intelligently at all.

Before he could really figure out what was going on, though, he would always drift back under.

He woke up for good, finally, exactly six days after he confronted his cognitive double. Dizzy, he blinked and looked up at the hospital room ceiling above him; it was cream-colored, and the room was fairly brightly lit; it hurt his eyes and he needed to close them for a couple more seconds. Goro groaned, and wished that somebody would turn off that light before it burned his eyes out of his skull; he sort of got his wish when shadow fell over him, but the sound of a voice snapped him out of the brief relief.

“Goro?”

He knew that voice well - achingly well, even if he’d never heard his first name come from it. Red eyes snapped open to find none other than Masayoshi Shido hovering over him, and his first instinct was to sit up and back himself against the headboard of the hospital bed. “No, no, don’t move around too much,” he was warned, and Shido reached out to him - seemed to consider moving him back into a laying position, but decided against it and moved back away. Goro was relieved that he didn’t try and touch him. His father’s manner of speaking and moving had already changed.

_ Did they change his heart? _

He supposed he would never visit him in the hospital if his heart  _ hadn’t _ been changed. Still wary, but too tired to keep his sitting position too much longer, Goro moved to lay down; the beeping of his heart rate slowed back down into a steady rhythm. “What are you doing here?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady and strong but failing to make himself as assertive as he wanted to. His voice was hoarse from underuse, and he was too weak where he lay to truly fake it.

“You’re my son. I wanted to come and make sure they were treating you alright.”

He’d never heard Shido openly refer to him as  _ a son _ before. As a child, he often daydreamed of his father’s heart being changed and of being treated as the offspring he was, illegitimate or not. Now, that wish was coming through about ten years too late, and it was more disturbing than anything else to hear such an acknowledgement from Shido’s lips. He wondered how his father even  _ knew, _ but he was always told he looked an awful lot like his mother. Perhaps it was obvious to everyone that knew about the affair.

There was a lot he wanted to say. He wanted to snap at Shido, cry and yell about the miserable childhood he’d been forced to live through, scream and blame him for his mother’s suicide and all the homes that treated him badly after that. He couldn’t decide on where to start, though, so he didn’t, simply staying quiet and staring with what he hoped was intensity.

Shido, for whatever it was worth, seemed at least to pick up on Goro not really wanting him around very much. He sighed and collapsed onto the visitor’s chair, putting a hand on his forehead and sighing. It took a couple of moments for Shido to finally speak up again. “Look. I’m going to turn myself in for all the corruption and death that I’ve caused. Don’t worry… I won’t say a word about you carrying out all the assassinations.” He sighed, looking off to the side, avoiding eye contact with Goro. “I know no apology is going to make up for everything I’ve done to you. But I want to make up for it… I want to atone. I’ll do my best to make up for all my mistakes.”

_ There’s nothing you can do to make up for anything, _ he wanted to say, but his lips pressed into a thin line. For what it was worth, Shido did look genuinely guilty - the Phantom Thieves definitely succeeded in changing his heart; he would never be any kind of repentant if they hadn’t. So he couldn’t accept any sort of apology or attempt at making things better. Goro sighed as he looked away.

“Let me think about it.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Shido nod and get to his feet. Not another word passed between them as his father left the room, closing the door behind him. Goro sighed and closed his eyes, covering his face with his hands. He looked between his fingers up at the cream color of the ceiling. He couldn’t even do anything to finish off Shido’s palace and help change his heart - he made Akira and his friends do it for him. He closed his fingers after a couple of seconds.

He’d spent the better part of a week sleeping, but now he just wanted to go back to it.

When he woke up again, there were two different guests standing by his bed, talking amongst themselves. The Niijima sisters had come to see him, and in a pair at that; Sae, he could assume would come here to see him (they worked closely together on many cases - he didn’t trust her, but it was hard not to get attached), but he couldn’t for the life of him think of why  _ Makoto _ would visit him.

Sae didn’t know what went on in her Palace; she wouldn’t know that he took advantage of her corruption to get her sister’s friend arrested. She probably knew that he was the traitor that got Joker arrested in the first place, but little else. Makoto, on the other hand, knew of his crimes, from taking advantage of her wish to save her sister to the murders he’d pulled off for Shido’s political rise to the top. Seeing them made guilt wash over his chest, and he almost felt the need to shrink away and hide in the cheap sheets of his hospital bed, but he wasn’t willing to lose any more of his dignity.

“I’m glad to see you’re awake.” Sae gave him a small smile and stepped a little closer to his bed. “You gave everyone quite a scare… Makoto told me you had mental shutdown symptoms when they got you out of the cognitive world. You’re very lucky to be alive.” She paused. “I’m here to thank you for protecting my sister. You could’ve died. I don’t know if your motives were really selfless, but the result was, and I appreciate that at the very least.”

Before he could speak up, Makoto beat him to it. Akechi almost felt cornered.

“Everyone is okay. We… we succeeded in our mission. Tomorrow is Election Day.” He was a little confused about what she meant at first, but it didn’t take much thinking to put two and two together; it made sense that Makoto wouldn’t want to mention her identity as a Phantom Thief in the hospital where any nurse could hear her. “Shido hasn’t made a lot of public appearances for the last few days. We think he’s going to make a statement before the results are announced tomorrow night, but we aren’t totally sure… it’s probably too late to throw off the results of the election anyway…”

Akechi nodded slowly. He didn’t really think it made much of a difference if the owner of a collapsed palace was jailed or not - either way, they were holding themselves accountable and were more of an honest individual, less likely to do any repeat crimes - but he supposed it would be nice for all of Shido’s victims to see the bastard jailed. It would certainly give  _ him  _ a sense of relief, anyway; he’d gone his entire life wanting his biological father to suffer, and one visit during a medical crisis wasn’t going to change any of that.

He thought about telling them that Shido stopped by to see him; that would probably be a pretty good indicator that the change of heart had been successful, as he hadn’t exactly been quiet about his father’s lack of care toward him when he spilled his heart to the Phantom Thieves. Something about the encounter seemed a little too… intimate, in an odd and familial sort of way, to tell anyone else about. “You haven’t had an unsuccessful change yet. I don’t see any reason why this mission would be any different.” He looked away from the sisters, staring at the increasingly familiar ceiling instead.

“That’s what Akira has been saying.” Makoto sighed, and Goro near immediately wanted to take it back just on the basis of having the same attitude as the leader of the Phantom Thieves. If there was one thing that was sticking out in his mind at the moment, though, it was the vague and fuzzy memory of Akira carrying him to the hospital - risking arrest to make sure that he got treatment… and the warm feeling he got as he watched the other boy walk away. So he bit his tongue.

“At this point, all you can do is hope, right?” he asked, putting on the fake smile he was so accustomed to using. Goro knew he needed to stop performing and pretending that he was all put together eventually, but lying in a hospital bed with two people he’d hurt to some level, it felt like the only power he really had. “You did your best to make it work. And… I truly appreciate that you’ve gotten this far in changing his heart, at least. And I’m grateful that you came to visit me, despite… everything.”

He wasn’t entirely lying - he  _ was _ glad to have the company, and he was glad to have some tiny form of forgiveness. Goro doubted that Makoto and Sae coming to see him was evidence of the entirety of the Phantom Thieves not holding a grudge against him - he wouldn’t be surprised if Haru and Futaba in particular remained angry with him for the remainder of their lives - but it at least showed him that he had  _ some _ chance to repent. Akira’s claims that he could get better, that it didn’t have to be this way, were slowly starting to ring true in his mind.

“It’s no problem.” Makoto smiled at him, and then linked her arm through her sister’s. “Visiting hours are ending soon, though, so… we probably should get going. I’ll make sure Akira knows you’re awake and people can come see you… he’s been pacing a hole in Leblanc’s floor waiting for news about you. Almost everyone has been waiting until they can come see you.”

“Why?” he asked, before he even knew that the question was building up in his throat.

“Well, you’re our teammate. Traitor or not… we don’t leave our friends behind.”

With that, the Niijima sisters walked together out the door to his hospital room. As they stepped through the doorway, Sae glanced back to look at him.

Goro saw pity in her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> please leave a comment if you enjoyed!


End file.
